


A Safe Place

by Argenteus_Draco



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Character Study, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, Endgame, Fix-It, Friendship, Gen, I Literally Wrote the Bones of This Story at 4:30 AM, Infinity Stone Soul World (Marvel), Memory Loss, Past Relationship(s), Platonic Love is Important, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), everybody needs a hug, survivor's guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-15 20:30:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18676879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Argenteus_Draco/pseuds/Argenteus_Draco
Summary: Clint told Fury about the dreams, about why he could never come back to the Avengers.In which Clint Barton tries to move on, and Bucky Barnes tries to know Natasha's family.





	A Safe Place

**Author's Note:**

> This work was written in reaction to and contains SPOILERS for Avengers: Endgame. 
> 
> If you do not wish to know the fate of certain characters, stop reading now.

The first time the Winter Soldier shows up at his house, Clint thinks its a mistake.

“Just checking in.” But he can’t quite meet Clint’s eyes when he says it.

 

#

 

He thinks he knows why people are “checking in.” He told Fury about the dreams, about why he could never come back.

“You know what I realized? After I woke up there?”

Natasha raises an eyebrow politely.

“We should have both gone over.”

“Then we’d both be dead.”

“But if we’d both made the sacrifice, we’d both have come out the other side.”

She sighs, considering, leans back on her elbows and stretches her feet out so that her toes dip into the shallow lake. “It’s a nice theory.”

“I should have—”

“Clint. It was my choice.” She looks out at the shrine in the distance, a small smile playing over her face. “Ask Steve about it sometime.”

 

#

 

“So I guess you’re making a habit of this.” Clint leans casually against the doorjamb, watching Bucky warily. “What are you doing here?”

“Just—”

“Checking in.” He waves the words away dismissively. “Except Laura tells me you were here twice last week. So what is it? Checking in? Spying on me? Or do you just really like my wife’s cooking?”

Bucky is silent for a long moment. Then he says, “I’m just… trying to understand.”

He walks back up the dirt path to the garage, and leaves.

 

#

 

“You’re angry.”

“He’s annoying, I’ll grant, but I’m not—”

“You’re angry,” Natasha says again. “You’re angry the way I was when you found me. You don’t show it to anyone but it’s there.”

“So what? You here to tell me it gets better? I’ve got to let the past go and live in the moment?”

“I’m here to tell you it’s a whole lot easier to do that with help.”

 

#

 

No matter where he is on the farm, he can hear the motorcycle long before Bucky actually arrives, so he’s always able to meet the Soldier at the door. Reformed or no, partner to Captain America or not, the man’s resolute, stoic, secretive nature still sets Clint’s hair on end.

“Wow,” he says. “Hasn’t even been a whole forty-eight hours and—”

“I came to apologize.”

Clint stops talking abruptly.

“I’m sorry.” He takes a well-worn notebook from the backpack he’s carrying, and holds it out to Clint. “I started keeping these again in Wakanda. She was helping.” He doesn’t have to specifiy who he means; Clint knows the name he can’t say as soon as he sees her neatly printed Cyrillic script beside Bucky’s blockier letters.

“And here,” Bucky points to a margin where Natasha had added a note, “she wrote ‘a safe place’ and coordinates, and they brought me here.”

Clint stares at the page, trying to imagine her doing so. Would she have been serious, or would she have made light, laughed while writing it? She knew what privacy meant to Clint, his family’s safety, how long it had taken to let her into this part of his life— no, she would not have been so cavalier about it.

He hands the notebook back to Bucky. He owes her this. “Let’s take a walk.”

 

#

 

They’re on their second turn around the pond when Clint says, “Do you want to talk about mind control?”

“No.”

“I know a little bit about it, too. I don’t know how well acquainted you became with Loki and that whole story,but he got me for a couple days. Nasty stuff.”

“I thought I said ‘no,’ I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I guess maybe she thought I’d understand. And I do, a little. If you wanted to talk about it.”

“No,” Bucky says again, more firmly. Then, quieter, “But thank you.”

 

#

 

It’s been a year. It’s the first time she comes to him anywhere other than that ethereal, orange-skied world.

“I thought I should do something, you know? I, um… I knew you wouldn’t want anything flashy, but I thought… Bruce helped pick it out.”

“You talk to him much?”

Clint shakes his head.

“I wish you would.” She puts a hand on the small, flat stone at the base of the tree. “It’s wonderful. But you got the date wrong.”

“I thought you were born in ’84?”

“But technically I died in 2014.”

He opens his mouth to refute her and stops. She laughs, gets up, and puts a hand on his shoulder. “Call the others? I bet they’d like to see.”

He wakes abruptly and sits bolt upright in bed, gasping, rubbing the suddenly cold place where she touched him.

 

#

 

Bucky comes every third Sunday for dinner now. Sometimes they talk about sports — much to Cooper’s delight, he turns out to be a fan of baseball. Sometimes he asks about what movies they’re watching, or what the kids are studying in school.

Today, he says, “Thor’s back.”

Clint almost drops his silverware.

“Not permanently, of course. Just visiting. But we got to talk for a bit.”

He tries to catch Laura’s eye, get her to change the subject, but she’s cleaning something off Nate’s face and doesn’t notice, and politely asks Bucky, “Anything interesting?”

“They’re looking for her.”

Everyone stops.

“Quill is looking for Gamora, I mean. But it stands to reason, if there’s a chance to find—”

Clint pushes his chair back so forcefully he nearly upends it, and all but drags Bucky out of his. “Outside,” he growls. “Now.”

He thinks he hears Nate start to ask “Who is Gamor—?” but he could be wrong; his ears are ringing he’s so angry. Goddamn her, she's right.

“Listen,” he says, when they’re on the opposite side of the house from the dining room. “Rule number one was we don’t talk shop inside. And how dare you do that just now?”

“I thought it was important enough news to break your rule.”

“No. Not that. How dare you give them that hope? You didn’t know her. You get to take your weird curiosity and pack it up with your notebooks and leave at the end of the day. I’m the one who has to go back inside and tell them that their Auntie Nat isn’t coming home, and that she did it so that I could. I’m the one who had to see—! ” He breaks off, takes a deep breath, realizes that he’d gotten steadily louder until he was shouting in the Soldier’s face at the end; now he lowers it again to say simply, “Get out.”

Bucky goes. Clint turns to go back inside.

“I think I did though.”

He turns back around, sees Barnes standing at the base of the porch steps, staring at the dirt.

“I’m still sorting out how. But I think I knew her.”

 

#

 

“So that’s the worst you’ve been in a while.” She props her feet irreverently up on one of the temple pillars, laying on her back in the shallow water, and smirks knowingly.

“You’re a pain in my ass.”

“Nice to know that some things never change.”

“This from someone who changes her hair like normal people change their shoes.” He looks down at her, the blond tips haloed out around her face, and adds, “I never got to tell you. I like it.”

“What?”

“Your hair, pulled back from your face like that. I wish you’d had a chance to teach Lila how to do that.”

Her smile turns sad. “So do I.”

 

#

 

Laura finds him in the kitchen, slumped over the table, head in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he says, without looking up. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t.” She pulls out the chair next to his, making room so that she can stand beside him and put her hands on his shoulders. “But it’s the third night in a row, Clint. Talk to me.”

“It’s nothing. It’s…”

Suddenly, he can’t take it anymore.

“I see her everywhere, Laura. Every time I close my eyes. Ever since she fell. I keep thinking I’m going to come around the corner and she’ll be sitting on the couch playing video games or looking through the cabinets for snacks or— or just here, you know?” He breaks off, swallows past the lump in his throat. “I’m loosing my mind, Laura.”

She wraps her arms around him and pulls him in so his head rests against her chest. “You aren’t. I promise.” He almost laughs until Laura adds, “She comes to me, too.”

He makes a noise that could be laughter or a complete breakdown. “What does she say?”

“Well, yesterday she told me to pour all the vodka down the drain before you drank yourself to death. Apparently being American you really can’t handle it.” Her voice wavers a bit at the end. “I miss her, Clint.”

He wants to say, “So do I,” but all at once he realizes he never cried for her, and just then it’s all he can do.

 

#

 

The next day his head feels clearer than it has since Vormir, and Clint calls Hill, and Fury, and every other contact he still has, and cashes in every favor he is still owed. Papers start arriving. Bundles of files, heavily redacted, that he has to get back on the phone and shout at people in three different languages before he gets clean copies of. And in them, finally, he locates the worst of her past, the parts he’d never wanted to know in detail, because as an agent “teenage assassin” had told him everything he’d needed, and as a friend it had been unimportant.

Fourteen months of missions partnered with the Winter Soldier. Violent. Bloody. Effiecient. Except when they weren’t. The first had gotten them in trouble with S.H.I.E.L.D. It was the latter part that had gotten them their trouble with HYDRA.

He tries to send the collection of documents to Barnes, but they’re returned. He and Sam are working a mission in Tennessee, and then in Santa Clara, and then in New York. It’s six months before he comes back to the farm.

“I know,” Bucky says, after Clint tells him about the files. “I started to get it back. My memories of her, of then, I mean.”

“After she…?”

“After you yelled at me.”

Clint makes a non-comittal sort of shrug. At least it was helpful.

“I’ve been wondering,” Bucky says slowly. “Do you think she would have done it, if she thought I remembered?”

Clint swallows hard. “I don’t know.” He runs a hand through his hair, stares at his boots. “If she thought she had something to come back to…”

Bucky looks out at Nate and Lila playing on the porch, at Cooper and Laura setting the table. “She did, Barton. And I’m… I’m glad.”

 

#

 

A few times after that, Clint thinks he hears the motocycle in the distance, but it never actually turns out to be approaching the farm.

 

#

 

It’s nearly dawn, and Clint has just fallen into bed, when he hears the distinct _thump_ of a car door closing in the driveway. Groggily, Laura mumbles, “whawasthat?” into her pillow, and Clint pushes himself up again and pulls on a tee shirt and goes to investigate. Something just tells him what to expect when he opens the door.

“Look who finally learned how to drive a car,” he says, and Barnes, for the first time, laughs at his quip.

“Had a passenger today.”

“God.” He can barely see straight, which in highsight he will claim is why he didn’t immediately recognize the figure pulling a duffle bag out of the back seat. “And this couldn’t wait until a proper hour for human beings to function?”

“No,” Bucky says simply. “It couldn’t.”

The figure straightens up and closes the door. All in black and backlit by the rising sun, Clint still can’t make out their face, but the way they move as they step around the car, toss their hair over their shoulder…

No.

No, it’s impossible. But at the same time he’s never been more sure of anything else in his life.

She smiles.

“Hey Clint.”

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this because I needed a chance to mourn, and I had been denied it in film.
> 
> If this has been helpful to you, please consider leaving a kind word our dear Natasha. I'd be grateful.


End file.
